Transcriptomics-based validation of the relatedness of heterogeneous nuclear ribonucleoproteins to chronic lymphocytic leukemia as potential biomarkers of the disease aggressiveness

Seven of the chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL)-related proteins processed transcript expression that predicted overall survival (OS) in CLL patients. Chronic lymphocytic leukemia patients were divided into 2 groups based on the median expression of the transcripts of interest; low-expression group (transcript expression <median expression) and high-expression group (transcript expression >median expression). This step was performed independently for each one of the transcripts of interest. A-G) Kaplan-Meier curve was utilized to compare the OS of the low-expression and high-expression groups. H) Patients with discordant expression of HIST1C1H and HNRNPUL2 were not included in the analysis.

Heatmap presentation of the correlation between HNRNPUL2 and genes of interest in chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) patients. The interrogation of Reactome database reported a significant enrichment of the cell cycle pathway by 101 genes of the genes whose expression significantly correlated with the expression of HNRNPUL2 in the CLL transcriptomics data sets (GSE39671; n=130). Excel software was used to sort the 130 CLL patients from left to right based on the ascending expression HNRNPUL2 (from lowest expression to highest expression). Then, the 101 genes were sorted from top to bottom on the bases of their Pearson scores (from 0.74-0.50), with HNRNPUL2 being at the top of the list. A) Heatmapper was used to construct a heatmap graphic based on the expression of the 101 cell cycle gens and HNRNPUL2 in the 130 patients. B) Of the other genes that correlated with the expression of HNRNPUL2, 7 (Pearson score ranged from 0.74-0.50) were previously shown to drive the progression of CLL.